Among the many immediately noticeable features of the landscape at European Utility Week is the presence of a growing number of telco application providers of which, though DigitalRoute technology is fundamentally industry agnostic, we might be seen as one.

The pace of change, indeed the appetite to act progressively, has traditionally not been noted as a characteristic of the utilities industry. But if European Utility Week, the trade gathering currently taking place in Amsterdam, is anything to go by that may be changing. And fast.

In the first two blogs in this series, we established the importance of managing data to the success of the digital transformation process. Having done so, in the next two blogs we will look at the beneficial outcomes that can be accrued by deploying effective data integration and management technology. To do this, we’ll examine the impact of such applications in actual deployments.

In the first blog in this series written for utilities, we wrote about the importance of leveraging data to the success of Internet of Things (IoT) and digital transformation strategies and we established that deploying the right technology in this area of business was a vital component of digital success. In this second blog, we’ll look at what that technology provides; what does it need to do and what are the features and functions that you want to look out for when acquiring and implementing it?

Most of us are more than familiar with buzzwords like the “Internet of Things” (IoT) and “digitization”. What’s less clear to many is what’s required to leverage the opportunities these technology advances offer. Neither the IoT nor the process of transforming into digital service provision is a “plug and play” process though, if successfully completed, both can be transformative for the utility, dramatically increasing business.

We’ve spent the last couple of blogs blue-sky thinking about future developments in OSS Mediation. The reality is that there are as many possible use cases as there network elements and OSS stack-applications; where there’s a data integration or data management requirement on the network side, there’s at least an opportunity to address it via OSS-M technology. But life, particularly business life, rarely follows a logical course so the next four blogs will focus on how OSS Mediation is actually being deployed, rather than speculating about how it could be in future.

If we take a helicopter view of the telco industry infrastructure, in some ways it’s pretty difficult to find something interesting to predict about OSS. We can argue about the likely speed of change and some of the nuances of progressive technologies and the challenges they present but in general it’s pretty hard to dispute the reality of change and the impact it will have. Capacity, speed, data volumes and network complexity (in this case meaning OSS complexity) will upsurge. Addressing those challenges will likely change telco priorities (and application investment patterns too).

Hastened by the march towards virtualisation, there has been a growing dialogue in recent months around the question of orchestration and in which domain it will ultimately sit. Questions like “will orchestration be encompassed within OSS?” abound. Or “will it evolve to encompass OSS itself?” (the opposite outcome). And from our perspective, “does mediation (read, data integration and management) have a role to play in the discharge of the orchestration function, wherever it sits?” We would contend that although mediation and orchestration are entirely separate functions, they are to some extent linked, as the former can contribute to the greater performance of the latter.

In previous blogs, we’ve discussed the myriad of simultaneously occuring changes in telco infrastructure; virtualisation, NFV and SDN, legacy, hybrid, and next generation networks running in parallell, service convergence (for instance, fixed, VOLTE, and VoIP), and so on. And that’s without mentioning what’s coming up next (or already here); the proliferation of IoT-based business models, 5G, digitization, and more. With so many pieces on the table, putting the jigsaw puzzle together in terms of operational efficiency is a challenge. How do you make sure everything runs smoothly?

In theory, the development of network technology can be characterized as progressive. Speed and capacity increase, service innovation is facilitated, new business models are enabled, profitability increases and so on. At least in theory that’s what happens.